Turkey

Iason Athanasiadis is reporting from Turkey on a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

ISTANBUL | A group of Istanbul's liberal intelligentsia clustered outside the Tutun Deposu gallery, an old tobacco warehouse in a working-class neighborhood of Istanbul to mark the anniversary of a 1915 pogrom.

Inside the renovated building, an all-female choir performed a selection of folk songs from the musical traditions of minorities persecuted during the last spasms of the Ottoman Empire.

ISTANBUL — Ottoman fezzes and false moustaches abounded. A man dressed as the Grim Reaper waited at a tram stop.

As the masked revelers made their way down Istanbul’s most famous pedestrian thoroughfare, well-dressed diners gaped from the area’s hundreds of restaurants and taverns.

With their eccentric procession, these fancily dressed merrygoers revived a bawdy working-class carnival, known as Baklahorani, banned by the Turkish authorities during World War II.

See the accompanying slideshow for this story at GlobalPost.com

ISTANBUL — They lived for almost 1,000 years around the remains of Istanbul's Byzantine walls. But when they were forced to leave, the gypsies of Sulukule only found out about their eviction from the journalists flocking to their shantytowns to cover the story.

In the 1920's Kemal Ataturk, modern Turkey's founder, forged the country in a strictly secular model, despite its largely Muslim population. Today traditional and Western influences vie for the hearts and minds of youth. Nowhere is this more apparent than in popular music here in Istanbul, the city that literally bridges Europe and Asia.

Produced by: Iason Athanasiadis and Sevin Turan

Videographer: Gokhan Acun

Editor: Seyfettin Tokmak

ISTANBUL | Israel's Gaza offensive has created fractures in the Israeli-Turkish alliance and deepened ties between Ankara and Tehran in what analysts fear could be the start of a major realignment in the region.

ISTANBUL — A gay peasant, a nymphomaniac and a lecherous imam all figure in a bawdy theatrical play about Turkey highlighting contemporary issues such as consumerism, emigration and the proliferation of a confessional talk-show culture. 

Israel's Gaza offensive may have benefits for Turkey, bolstering its diplomatic profile in what some commentators call "neo-Ottomanism" and a Turkish newspaper hailed as a "golden age" for Turkish diplomacy.

Istanbul is an overpopulated metropolis whose estimated 14 million inhabitants are straining it at its seams. Centuries of events in arguably the world's most historical city have shaped an urban environment so varied that it regularly throws up baffling scene changes for the traveler caring to venture a little beyond the Sultanahmet-Taksim-Bebek triangle that delineates most foreign visitors' trips. The common denominator is a rush to build and modernize, often at the expense of the layers of history lying underneath or – often – right on the surface.

Whether Istanbul or Constantinople, this solitary city that straddles both Europe and Asia and was the capital of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires, has always exerted a splendor that bequeathed it its Greek epithet, the Vasilevousa (the Reigning/Majestic One).

Istanbul, Turkey - A GAGGLE OF EMIRATI art curators clad head to toe in black hijab paused in front of "Odalisque," British painter Frederick Leighton's sensuous portrait of a partially exposed Oriental beauty gazing indulgently at a long-beaked swan.

Kristine Von Oehsen, the British Council exhibition curator guiding the group, tried to persuade the delegation there was little scandal in the discreet nudity, but the all-female group of Emiratis looked unconvinced.

Iason Athanasiadis, for the Pulitzer Center
Istanbul, Turkey

For president-elect Barack Obama, his arrival on the international scene has been one of near-universal acclaim. Around the world, he is seen as the man who can transform the perception of an ailing America and reclaim that country's ideal of being "the shining city upon a hill". Except in Turkey.

Iason Athanasiadis, for the Pulitzer Center
Istanbul, Turkey

Millions of Muslim break their fast today (Tuesday 29 September) for one last time as the holy month of Ramadan comes to an end and a new moon appears in the skies. But in Turkey, where Ramadan is pronounced Ramazan, this year was not so much a time of reflection, self-denial and prayer as an extension of the political battlefield between secularists and the faithful over public and private behaviour during the holy month.